Wang Huaiqing

executed in 2013-2014, this work is number 1 from an edition of 6

Private Collection, China

Overall in good condition, with occasional very minor paint losses to the extremities of the supporting legs, only visible upon close inspection.
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Wang Huaiqing - The Multidimensionality of Life

From figurative realism, to capturing the elegance of his Shaoxing hometown, and the overt deconstruction of Ming-style furniture, Wang Huaiqing’s art has undergone a three-stage  “construction – deconstruction – reconstruction” process of exploration. Hidden within the ink is a profound dynamism and exquisite literati sentiment, revealing that while the artist’s style belongs to the same school as that of Lin Fengmian, Wu Guanzhong, and Wu Dayu, it’s also seemingly tethered to the literary spirit of the Song and Yuan dynasties. In 1991, Wang Huaiqing’s Great Ming Manner was awarded the gold medal at the Annual Exhibition of Chinese Oil Painting held by the National Art Museum of China. The painting, which takes the chair of an imperial tutor as its subject, represents a key moment of change in the artist’s creative career. From then on, the chair that Wang Huaiqing bestowed with humanity became the creative vehicle through which the artist investigated and broke new ground in the boundaries of art, fluidly traveling between the classical and the modern, the East and West, the abstract and the figurative, memory and reality, as well as two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality, crisscrossing among blends of aesthetic concepts. “This painting is no longer about a chair, but about a type of culture,” Wang once said. “Using a human figure to show an expression of life is not unusual, but using a chair to show the expression of life requires an extraction, over a long period of time, of what is complex and subtle from within human culture.”

Since his early experimentation with arranging pieces of furniture by style, the artist has constructed works of rich and varied emotion and artistic concept, bestowing objects with the reverence and life of humanity. Through a process of distilling, purifying, and transforming everyday, commonplace objects, Wang blurs the lines of “abstractionism” and “naturalism.” He penetrates the concept of the equivocality of vision while extending the tradition of Eastern culture and giving it new life. Art historian Michael Sullivan has attributed Wang’s artist accomplishments to his individual nature, saying “Wang Huaiqing’s works takes his sensitivity to humanity – which includes elements of his own nature as well as a perception that comes from being Chinese – and joins it with an energy that has allowed him to create what seems like poetic order out of an agitation of chaos. In this way, the artist’s paintings inspire profound admiration.”

Rodin once said in RODIN L‘ART, “All of the great artists probe the concept of space.” Beginning in 2011, Wang delved into a new series of three-dimensional pieces. Still using the subject of Chinese furniture, which the artist had mastered, he removed them from the two-dimensional canvas and brought them into three-dimensional space. Yet this transformation did not restore furniture to its original form, but rather gave rise to something wondrous, something that transcended the figurative conception of furniture and bestowed it with new interpretation and life. Wang’s aluminum alloy sculpture What (Lot 37) is one of the highlights of this new three-dimensional series, and is also one of the most experimental pieces in the artist’s oeuvre since transitioning from easel painting to sculpture. With cross-stacked stools, the piece presents an expression of extreme modernism, and while continuing with the artist’s mother tongue of “furniture,” he seems to have created something that evolves from “object” to “organism,” and shuttles back and forth between the two states of being. The artistic language of the work is filled with the Eastern concepts of “twisting” and “folding,” and thus transcends the traditional notions of two- or three-dimensionality. At once solemn and humorous, evoking estrangement and knowing, the piece is yet another testament to the creative style of Wang Huaiqing as he communicates – at a deep layer of precision and intersection – both East and West, past and present.